Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

on as he crossed into the stone circle, mist boiled up, drowning him, and he floundered forward. Was that the ring of battle in the distance? If he walked far enough, would he stumble back to the place he’d come from?

Did he want to?

He struck full against the altar stone, banging his thighs, and held himself up against the cold stone. The ringing had a gentle voice, not weapons at all but the click of leaves on the bronze cauldron.

“Why come you to the gateway?” said a voice he recognized from his dream.

He looked up but could see only a shape moving in the mist and the spark of blue fire, quickly extinguished.

“Why am I here? Where am I?”

“You have not traveled far as humankind measures each stride of the foot,” she answered. “I brought you off the path that leads to the Other Side. Has it not been told to you that you are to be the new husband of the Hallowed One of this tribe?”

He touched the amber necklace at his neck, remembering the way Adica had invited him to sleep beside her. He had been angry, then, because he felt his desire was shameful. “None here speak in a language I understand, nor can they understand me. How is it that we can speak together, you and I, while 1 speak as a foreigner would with the others? You aren’t even human.”

“By my nature I am bound to what was, what is, and what will be, and so my understanding is alive in the time to come as well as the time that is and the time that was.” Abruptly her tone changed, as though she were speaking to someone else. “Listen!” Her voice became faint. He heard the soft percussion of her hooves on the ground, moving away. “I am called. Adica comes looking.” Fainter still: “Beware. Guard the looms. The Cursed Ones walk!”

“Can’t you give me the gift of speech?” he called, but she was already gone.

“Alain!”

The mist receded as suddenly as it had come. Adica hurried to meet him as twilight settled over the stones. He sat down, worn out by labor and by strangeness.

Adica stopped before him and looked him over, both alarmed and concerned and, maybe, just a little irritated. She was handsome rather than pretty, with a wickedly sharp gaze and a firm mouth. This close, he had the leisure to study her body: she had the pleasing curves of a woman who usually gets enough to eat, but she had a second quality about her, an intangible strength like the glow off a hidden fire. In a funny way, she reminded him of Liath, as if magic threw a cloak over its wielders, seen as a nimbus of power.

Her next words reproved him, although he couldn’t be sure for what. Abruptly, she saw the line of the amber necklace where it lay concealed under his linen tunic.

Reproof vanished. She brushed a finger along the ridge the string of amber made under the soft fabric, then flushed.

“You gave this to me, didn’t you?” he asked, lifting it on his fingers to display it.

She smiled and replied in a tone half caressing and half flirtatious.

“Ai, God, I wish I could understand you,” he exclaimed, frustrated. “Is it true I’m to be your husband? Are we to come to the marriage knowing so little of each other? Yet I knew nothing of Tallia on the day we were taken to the wedding bed. Ai, Lady, so little did I know of her!” He could still feel the nail in his hand, proof of her willingness to deceive.

Mistaking his cry, or responding to it, Adica took hold of his hand and pulled him to his feet. For an instant, he thought she would kiss him, but she did not. In silence, she led him back to the village. The clasp of her hand made his thoughts swim dizzyingly until they drifted up at last to the centaur shaman’s last words. Who were the Cursed Ones? What were the looms? And how could he tell Adica, when they had no language in common?

2

“COME, up, to morning sun!” Kel prodded Alain awake. “To work!” He made an expansive gesture that included himself, Tosti, and Alain. “We go to work.”

Three more days had passed in the village. It was a prosperous place, twelve houses and perhaps a hundred people in all. They had about a fourth of the outer palisade raised and today headed back to the forest to fell trees. Work made the day pass swiftly.

During one leisurely break, Kel finished carving a stout staff out of oak, ornamenting each end with the face of a snarling dog. When next Beor hoisted his ax near Alain with a surly and threatening grimace, Kel made a great show of presenting the newly carved staff to Alain and even got Tosti to stand in for a demonstration of how the snarling dogs could “nip” at a man’s most delicate parts.

The men’s laughter came at the expense of Beor this time, and he grunted and bore it, since to stalk off into the forest would have made him look even more ridiculous. Grudgingly, he let Alain work in peace as the afternoon wore on.

But that evening they returned home to a somber scene. During the day, a child had died. By the stoic look on the faces of the dead child’s relative, they’d known it was coming. Alain watched as women wrapped the tiny body in a roughly-woven blanket, then handed the limp corpse to the father. He laid it in a log split in half and gouged out to make a coffin. After the mother placed a few trinkets, beads, feathers, and a carved wooden spoon beside its tattooed wrist, other adults sealed the lid. Together, they chanted a singsong verse that sounded like prayer.

A strange half-human creature emerged from Adica’s house, clothed in power, with gold antlers and a gleaming torso. It took him two breaths to recognize Adica, dressed in the garments of power she had been wearing when he had first arrived.

She blessed the coffin with a sprinkling of scented water and a complicated series of gestures and chants. Four men carried it out of the village as Adica sealed their path, behind them, with more charms and chants. The entire village walked in silent procession to the graveyard, a rugged field marked by small mounds of earth, some fresh, some overgrown with nettles and hops. Male relatives laid the coffin in a hole. The mother cut off her braid and threw it on top of the coffin, then scratched her cheeks until blood ran. The wailing of the other women had a kind of ritual sound to it, expected, practiced; the mother did not weep, only sighed. She looked drained and yet, in a way, relieved.

Maybe the child had been sick a long time. Certainly Alain had never seen this one among the children who ran and played and did chores in the village all day.

The grave was filled in and the steady work of piling and shaping a mound over the dead child commenced. In pairs and trios, people returned to the village, which lay out of sight beyond a bend in the river. Alain remained because Adica had not yet left. Sorrow and Rage flopped down, resigned to a long wait.

Twilight lay heavily over them. Even in the five days he had been here, he noticed how it got darker earlier every night as the sun swept away from midsummer and toward its midwinter sleep. By the harvest and the weather, he guessed it was late summer or early autumn.